Usually saying you 'learned from the best' is hyperbole, but not for Camille Hearst. The Stanford engineering graduate started her career at Apple during the Steve Jobs era, right as the late billionaire and product genius was working with designer Jony Ive to change music consumption forever with the iPod.

Hearst was one of the first product managers at iTunes, where she worked between 2005 and 2010. "It was the number eight music retailer when I started," she said. "And the number one when I left."

Her trajectory since then has included stints at tech giants YouTube and Google, as well as a gig with Hailo, the U.K.-based taxi hailing app that failed to crack the U.S. market. But she'd always itched to strike out on her own as an entrepreneur, since taking part in the prestigious Mayfield Fellows startup work/study program as an undergraduate.

Today, Hearst is the cofounder and CEO of Kit, a social recommendation platform where tastemakers share products they love. In November, she and cofounder Naveen Selvadurai, formerly of Foursquare, announced a $2.5 million seed round to grow the company.

Investors include Social Capital, Precursor Ventures, Slack head of product April Underwood, former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao, Authentic Ventures, Black Angel Tech Fund, and Expa. The latter, a startup incubator, originally backed Kit when it quietly launched in the fall of 2015.

This seed round makes Hearst only the 12th African-American woman ever to raise more than $1 million to grow a startup, according to data from Project Diane, a definitive study of the state of black women in tech entrepreneurship that took the better part of a year to complete.

Hearst says funding will go into testing as Kit explores ways to monetize effectively and expand its search capabilities. It's currently pre-revenue, although the influencers using its platform are already making money through Amazon.com affiliate codes.